Welcome to the ASP.NET Web Matrix mailing list.

During its relatively short but spectacularly successful life, Microsoft
Active Server Pages (ASP) has grown from a simple scripting environment
for creating dynamic Web pages into a powerful and easy-to-use platform
for fully-fledged Web application development. In its latest
incarnation, ASP.NET, it provides a complete solution for building
almost any type of interactive user interface, as well as for
implementing extensive back-end processing operations.

With the advent of .NET, support for ASP.NET development has been fully
integrated into Visual Studio .NET. It provides an extremely powerful
and usable environment for ASP.NET development in the guise of Web
Forms, as well as the more traditional types of application (Windows
Forms). And now Visual Studio .NET is joined by another Microsoft
product, namely the Microsoft ASP.NET Web Matrix.

At the time of writing, Web Matrix has just been released as a Beta 1
product. The whole nature of the Microsoft ASP.NET Web Matrix project is
that it will develop and grow based on feedback from the community that
uses it, so the feature set will evolve over time. However, even at this
stage Web Matrix is an extremely usable and efficient tool, and
certainly well worth installing and experimenting with. In time, it
will, without doubt, mature and be extended to provide many more of the
features required for building Web sites and Web applications using
ASP.NET.

From first impressions, you may think that Web Matrix is just a
simplified development environment for building ASP.NET applications. In
fact, it provides much more than this. As well as ASP.NET pages
(including mobile device pages), Web Matrix can be used to create user
controls and class files (for compiling into assemblies), Web service
files, and even HTTP Handlers. It also provides integrated support for
creating and editing HTML pages, style sheets, XML schemas and
documents, text files and SQL scripts, and .NET configuration files
(such as web.config and global.asax).

Web Matrix also provides powerful wizards that automate much of the
process of creating pages that handle data, pages that use output
caching, and pages that use the built-in ASP.NET authentication
features. It also comes complete with its own Web server, and other
useful add-ins. You can even create and install your own add-ins if you
wish.

A free PDF document describing Web Matrix in detail available is
available from the ASP.NET resources site at http://www.asp.net/.